AROMATHERAPY

For reasons that remain mysterious to us, we are prone, these last couple of years, to slip into the occasional black despair here at Mango Pudding Blues. Yes, we become uncharacteristically gloomy and find ourselves wanting to violently seize and shake our corporate coworkers the way hillbillies shake their babies.

Now, about a year ago at a trade show we came upon some free samples of these ridiculous little aromatherapy pens. They look like little highlighter pens, but instead of being filled with neon-colored ink, they’re filled with soothing herbal fluids that are designed to dispel anxiety or increase wellness or decrease cravings and so on. There were many different kinds. We chose the type that purported to ameliorate murderous rage and brought it back to the office. It smells nice. A little minty, a little ylang-ylangey. You know.

Anyway, so now we sniff the little bastard on days like these to keep from leaping over the conference room table and strangling someone. But we have a new worry: If we only sniff it during our murderous rages, are we not in fact building a pavlovian cycle in which the association between the aroma and the rage is so strong that a single minty sniff can in fact trigger the rage, instead of dispelling it? And wouldn’t this single point of irrefutable logic apply to any kind of aromatherapy in general? And wouldn’t the entire quack aromatherapy industry collapse like a house of cards if this ever got out?

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ADVICE

Do any of you have any advice to help me learn to read music a little better? Can any of you confirm my suspicion that moments of socially dead small talk only become geometrically more annoying as you get older? Are any of you still capable of denying that we don’t look like we imagine we do, and that the difference between the way we think we’re appearing and our real appearance is a critical mystery in our image-saturated post-modern psyche? Do any of you know the brand of jeans Hugh Grant was sporting in About A Boy? I want those jeans.

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THE ACCIDENTAL INVENTION OF SOUL

In the ongoing attempts to get our left hand to play rhythms independently of our right hand’s melodies, we are pleased to report not only a breakthrough, but the invention of reggae last Saturday afternoon and, surprisingly, soul music this morning some time between 6:30 and 7:00. Like Archimedies, like Louis Pasteur, like Florence Fucking Nightingale, we were looking for one thing and discovered something else.

We are hoping our piano teacher will be impressed.

THE DEATH CARD

This morning, floating in the canal as I passed by on my way to work, the bobbing body of a decomposing rabbit. And then a belly-up fish, which I’ve never seen in the canal before. This weekend I saw a few unusually large orange rodents dead by the roadside. On Friday, a freshly killed big bird on the road home, complete with crow messily slurping up viscera. So many dead animals laid at my feet I’m starting to think it’s a sign. But what? Perhaps it’s like the Tarot death card, signifying only change. The death of my youth? The passing of the final shreds of my dignity? An indication of the end of vegetarianism? Not just mine, but of vegetarianism as a movement, as it will surely collapse without my support.

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THIRTY SEVEN

Readers outside of the commonwealth countries, know this: as you go about your regular day in your regular life, we here in Canada are sitting on our asses, eating cake with ice cream and generally holidaying. Officially, this is to celebrate Queen Victoria. Why? We at Mango Pudding Blues don’t know why. But what we do know is that this official holiday is also our own personal birthday. Mango Pudding Blues day. Not the blog, no. But we physically ourselves. We popped, screaming, slippery, starving hungry, onto the scene 37 years ago, and we’ve been fuckin’ up the program ever since.

You may address your kind birthday wishes to the e-mail link to the left.

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